Warlock: Master of the Arcane demo on Steam (50 turns) Fantasy Civ/4X

This is and interesting fantasy Civ style game with magic instead of tech, the focus is more on combat/production.

A lot of people are comparing it to a game that I never played, Master of Magic but from the descriptions sounds like I should have played it..

The demo is decent and gives you a good idea of the mechanics game, however my experience was that it might be a little shallow later on.

I didn't really have enough time to actually get into a war with another mage, there seemed to be a lot of exploring and combat with neutral creatures and a good amount of interesting hexes that give bonuses to make city placement strategic there are also portals to other plains which are dangerous (high level neutrals) but likely have rewards.

Launched fine for me, and I quite enjoyed it. Civ 5 era version of Master of Magic in many ways.

I've only played the demo, so I can't say it's fair to judge the whole game by it, but I was having a very good time with the demo and will most likely be buying. I know I don't have a grasp on all of the mechanics quite yet, but overall it plays quite well. Unit upgrades are nice, spell buffs, summoned units, unit movement on water, all pretty cool. I think the WTF video communicates the game better than I can - I'd give that a watch. I did have some neutral mobs pop up that slapped me around pretty hard late in the demo (back in my 'secure' territory), so watch out for that

I tried the demo and bought the game as soon as my first 50 round session ended. As someone who has wasted, err... logged an unhealthy number of hours in Civ IV and V, I will say the CIV-meets-fantasy/D&D description is apt. One cool thing I noticed immediately is that you can stop combat animation by simply left-clicking. I also like the concept of conquering and holding territory on the World map and in other realms. The magic lines you get to research are also randomized for each game(Not sure if this can be toggled in the full game). I like this, because it'll force me to try new combos/lines, instead of just plowing through the same old tried and true research lines like I do in CIV.

I loved Master of Magic, and while this looks promising, it's not the first time that something looked good at the outset.I bought Elemental: War of Magic sight unseen, and while it was okay, it wasn't $40 okay.I'll try the demo for this, but after the EWOM debacle (and the SOTS2 disaster, which I was fortunate enough to avoid), I'm being cautious with 4X games of any sort.

Too many games these days try to claim to be the next MOO/MOM and end up failing horribly.

It appears to be Steamworks. I got it off Gamersgate and was allowed to download 1.5 GB of data, but trying to install just automatically redirected me to redeem my serial key in Steam. Then Steam says the game's not yet released.

I loved master of magic so much. My friend and I were enthralled by that game. I used to go over to his house in junior high because he had a pentium 60 (I only had a 486), and we played that game for hours.

I became more and more depressed over the years that no one could make a similar game. Might and Magic was similar, but I think there were some key differences, including combat.

It has been so long that I can't even remember all the things I liked about it that made it so cool, but I will definitely check this out when I get home.

I played a bit of the demo. Civ like with a MoM influence. Not too bad. I was hoping for stacks and the tactical combat of MoM. I haven't decide if I will buy yet, as I have too many other games to play currently.

The only downside of it being hex based and somewhat Civ like is the subtle differences in how things work. After 500+ hours in Civ V some shortcut keys and right vs. left click are second nature and things are not exactly the same here. Not a big deal however.

Yeah combat was the first thing I thought about. I haven't played a Civ game in quite a while, so I'm not sure if it's more in depth now, but I remember the battles in MoM were one of my favorite parts. I was going to ask what they were like in this, but I figured I would just check out the demo/videos when I get home.

Yeah combat was the first thing I thought about. I haven't played a Civ game in quite a while, so I'm not sure if it's more in depth now, but I remember the battles in MoM were one of my favorite parts. I was going to ask what they were like in this, but I figured I would just check out the demo/videos when I get home.

From what I understand, the developers of this game did Elven Legacy and Fantasy Wars. So they are comfortable with making different units balancing each other out rather than each civilization having the same units. Also, this means that Warlock, unlike MoM or MoO but like Civ, has combat taking place on the strategic level. Also unlike older Civs, there is no unit stacking (i.e. each hex can contain only one unit).

One of the biggest things that require getting used to is that each town can only build 1 building per population unit, and each building occupies one hex. By necessity your cities will specialize somewhat.

Seems neat so far. No problems installing or playing on Win 7 x64. I really like the idea of city buildings growing with population, with limited room. Great unit variety.

It's definitely not an AAA product though (hey, for $20 I didn't expect it to be). Quibbles and unexplained questions so far:

- Zoom out changes the viewing angle, and maximum zoom seems rather limited

- Is there no click-and-drag for the main view? Major issue, because there's no mouse-lock for multiple monitors. Ideally I'd prefer windowed mode + click-and-drag, but fullscreen + edge-of-screen would also be acceptable if it didn't fail. At the moment I'm using arrow keys or minimap, neither of which is a good solution.

- Is there any explanation of the various terrain types and their effects? The game manual is just a concept tutorial.

- Is there any penalty for sprawling empires? Settlers are super-cheap; is there any reason why I shouldn't just plonk down a city in any free space?

Having played several hours this evening, I'm really starting to appreciate this game. It's sort of like playing the "battle chess" version of Civ V. Indeed, Warlock relies on the same basic concepts and the same core set of rules as Civ, but it really delights in just blowing shit up. Often and well.

Warlock is not a game about subtle balance. It's about turning up the exploits to "insanity" and seeing how much fun it is for your grossly overpowered squadron of dragons to go all Hulk-a-mania and run wild on your enemies. Its the sort of game where you can do everything right for 150 turns, but fuck if the other guy doesn't teleport a goddamn Level 10 Giant right on top of your capitol city while your own army is 15 hexes away punching gold coins out of a rats nest. And boom, its game over in two turns.

The result is pretty entertaining. Warlock has a very distinct feeling from Civ. In Civ you are in control the whole time, even when you're losing. Even the best Civ opponents won't surprise you with an end-run you didn't see coming. In Warlock, meanwhile, end-runs would be an example of an organized form of chaos. You literally have be prepared for any and everything from some kind of combo chain lightening storm that wipes out your entire siege force, to said Level 10 Giant showing up in your morning shower.

I like that. It's fun. This game begs for multiplayer. Worth $20 in my view. No crashes or lockups or anything under Win7.

NavyGothic wrote:

- Zoom out changes the viewing angle, and maximum zoom seems rather limited

I like that actually. It works like GalCiv 2. Zooming out seamlessly shifts to a 2D top-down hex map. Agreed that it would be nice if you could see more of the map at once.

Quote:

- Is there any explanation of the various terrain types and their effects? The game manual is just a concept tutorial.

Presumably a wiki is in the works. It would be really nice to see charts showing the building construction dependencies, magic research table, and a bestiary so I know what optimal units to go for at my various stages of development.

Quote:

- Is there any penalty for sprawling empires? Settlers are super-cheap; is there any reason why I shouldn't just plonk down a city in any free space?

As far as I can tell, the downside is basically the high risk of losing invested capital costs (time, buildings, training settlers, etc) because these small cities are very vulnerable to attack. Even wandering neutral and monster stacks are powerful even to steamroll a weak city if you don't have the armies handy to defend it. But as with risk so with reward. Spamming cities lets you tap loads of mana nodes for example, which in turn lets you exploit the more powerful damage and summoning spells every turn. Again, its not nuanced, but it is fun.

I've played for about 4 hours now, and I think I agree entirely with your assessment. It's nowhere near as complex as Civ V (and the diplomacy makes Civ V look like Europa Universalis III), but damned if I'm not having fun anyway. My army of veterans, rangers and healers is thoroughly trashing the silly wizards who declare war on me (which is, you know, everyone), and I have enough mana to maintain a dozen city buffs while spamming heals every turn. Good times.

Definitely going to have to turn the difficulty up to max next game, because I just killed my first wizard and, well, the fire elementals scattered around the map were a bigger threat than his entire civilisation.

The edges are a little rough, but hopefully they'll get around to a bugfix / UI / balance patch sometime. Until then, the issues are annoying rather than gamebreaking, and I guess I can live with that.

Pretty sure I can confirm that there's no penalty for going ICS with your settlers. Not sure yet whether 4 or 6 spaces between cities is optimal; 6 gives you more efficient ubercities at very high populations, but I suspect most games would be well and truly decided (if not over completely) before your 2-hex margin cities run out of space. I still think the 1-building-per-tile-and-pop mechanic is excellent.

Just finished winning my first game, Normal difficulty Small world 2 opponents. It was sadly easy due to a few simple reasons: Catapults have 3 range, I picked Firestorm as my initial power, and all of our empires were on the same continent.

The basic problem is that an opponent is defeated if their capital is taken. And catapults can attack with impunity if you have enough infantry as a screen line, because non-flying units can't go around your lines without coming under attack, and other ranged archers don't have the range. So I just focused all my forces to attacking their capitals and both enemies fell after just 5-7 turns of focused assault. And any time they accumulated enough troops, my firestorm will completely decimate their army. I was able to also completely ignore the mystical monsters (Ogre, bears, etc.) because they weren't between me and the AI.

1) Is there a "remove building" button I'm missing? I wanted to destroy some buildings that were too costly and not useful but couldn't find how to do it. I could click on the building from the city management view, but I wasn't sure what it did.

2) So things like Smithies and Training Camps only apply to the city they're built in, right? But what about things like Foundry that provide Masterwork armor? Those also only apply to a particular city?

I've been keeping an eye on this game. I've been waiting and waiting for a turn based multiplayer game like Civ:Rev. Glad to hear they're working on multiplayer and I'll look into picking it up when they finish. Hopefully they get it done quick before the next "new shiney" comes out.

I like turn based games but the AI just never seems to hold up. In Civ 5 the AI could do non-domination victory. I had to stop playing Civ5 when an AI would attack me with 20 troops when I only had 1 garisoned per city(so lets say, 5) and they'd be effortlessly beaten back. Then I'd take all their cities because they had nothing left to defend with. This is why I like my turn-based games to be against real players.

In some game systems AI can put up a fight, but I've found strategy games not to be one of them. The lack of good multiplayer strategy games is why I started playing table top miniture games...

I played the demo last night, and while the AI in W:MotA isn't spectacular, it seemed a little better than the crap fest of Civ 5 (man, I wanted to love Civ 5. Have they fixed the AI yet? For real this time?)

I had this rat guy next to me, and he made some really bad strategic decisions (fighting a war on multiple fronts, being overly aggressive / over extended) and I was able to take him down, but he was nicely opportunistic in some cases - I moved a unit one step too far and he layers on a few ranged attacks and a few melee attacks and poof. Civ 5 never seemed able to grasp that idea of focus fire on a guy to kill him. I like the rest mechanic - you have to have not moved at all, but then resting gives you a good chunk of life back quickly. Units are pretty hard to kill sometimes - between heals, resists, and the "running away" factors when a given unit gets low, which means you need to be smart about how you use your spell time and your attacks, which I like.

The enemy was able to push out multiple units each turn, more or less on demand it seemed - I don't know if he had just queued that far in advance or if there is some kind of 'hurry up' production option somewhere. Ranged stuff seems pretty OP - he had a shaman unit that had a good defenses and was nigh unkillable with my units, so I damaged him a little and then finished with a big shadow bolt from the heavens.

Is there anything that impacts the rate of population growth? I was trying to see if it was tied to surplus food - I didn't think so but I wasn't sure.

1) Is there a "remove building" button I'm missing? I wanted to destroy some buildings that were too costly and not useful but couldn't find how to do it. I could click on the building from the city management view, but I wasn't sure what it did.

2) So things like Smithies and Training Camps only apply to the city they're built in, right? But what about things like Foundry that provide Masterwork armor? Those also only apply to a particular city?

1. No, you can't destroy buildings. Apparently that was in the beta, but they removed it; I'm guessing because it removed a lot of the strategy from city planning. Clicking on a building disables it; you might want to do that if you've built an expensive unit producing structure, but don't want to build those units anymore.

2. All building buffs are automatically provided to units built in that city (after the buff is acquired, it's not retroactive). However, you can feed the buff to any other units by paying an upgrade cost. It's quite expensive, so plan your cities carefully.

odshaghat wrote:

Is there anything that impacts the rate of population growth? I was trying to see if it was tied to surplus food - I didn't think so but I wasn't sure.

No, as far as I can tell population growth just declines naturally as the city increases in size. By the time you hit 10+, natural growth slows to a crawl. However, there are spells you can cast to give additional growth to a particular city.

I have a feeling that there's lots I don't know like the best areas to build a city or the effectiveness of certain units but I don't feel the game is punishing me for not knowing these things. It's a very aggressive game as not only do you fight the other wizards you also have to deal with wandering monsters and neutral cities. Any of which can attack you in force if you mistakenly leave a city undefended.

I'm not sure if its buggy or I just don't know the right key to press but I can't seem to cancel a movement order that goes further than one turns worth of movement. When the next turn begins the unit won't let itself be moved until I click end turn and then will only move that distance and no more even if its less than the units capability.

Huh. With all the internet jibber-jabber floating around that Warlock is basically a professionally done Civ mod, the Warlock devs have seen fit to emphasized that Warlock is not based on the Civ V engine. As stated on the official Warlock forums:

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Hi All, I'm the Development Team Leader of Warlock: Master of the ArcaneIt seems to me, that there were no 4x grand strategies except Civ for so long time, that people begin to associate the whole genre with this one game. So now when Warlock is going to be out - it is the easiest way to talk about it as about Fantasy Civ.I need to say that there should be some similarities in our games since we are solving the same problems and working in the same 4x genre. So we are working with the same world/unit scale and sometimes choosing same technical decisions ( For example, when you are drawing so many trees - player shouldn't be allowed to rotate camera. But I think that our game is better looking and faster working, thanks to our engineers and artists.)

And I want to be clear:We have no art from Civ,We have no code from it,Nobody in our team has ever worked in or with Firaxisand we are working on the same engine that was used previously for Fantasy Wars and Elven Legacy ( that had hexes, cities, 1unit per hex system and animated battles all before Civ. Really we saw many similarities in Civ5 derived from our game.)Warlock has different game mechanicsWarlock has different game worldWarlock has different building systemeven "Zone of control" not only looks different but works differentlyWarlock is something between Elven Lagacy and MoM, that we are still playing from time to time.Our game is about Exploration, Magic Battles, Bulding an Empire and Buffing and Upgrading units.Yes it is 4x grand scale strategy and I hope there will be more.

Huh. With all the internet jibber-jabber floating around that Warlock is basically a professionally done Civ mod, the Warlock devs have seen fit to emphasized that Warlock is not based on the Civ V engine.

I think the game puts a better strategic twist on city building due to limited space, and the combat AI is fairly sophisticated. Also, there is no hammer/production value, i.e. all cities produce all units & buildings at exactly the same rate.

However, AI cheats like a whiny teenager bitch that just spawns units into position, and there is no real diplomacy to speak of. No trade and very limited non-aggression pacts. And there isn't much advanced research or unit upgrades. Most units come in 2, maybe 3 forms. More Age of Wonders than Civ.

I have about 22 hours in on the full version and have been enjoying it. It seems awfully forgiving though. Almost to a fault. I cranked up the difficulty on a game last night and it's slightly better in that the enemies seem to be more efficient and quicker to advance but I still found myself winning with a very basic army of two unit types and the obvious tactic of putting my warriors up front and keeping my catapults behind them. There are a ton of research and construction options to choose from as the game progresses but I didn't find much need to deviate from my basic melee+siege tactic at all. Maybe they could work on some balance tweaks or AI improvements but I think the game really just needs some good multiplayer support.

Viridis wrote:

And there isn't much advanced research or unit upgrades.

I didn't find this to be the case, exactly. Every time a unit levels up, they pick one of three perks. There are several city structures (iron/silver forge, academy, alchemist, etc.) that add offensive, defensive, movement, and sight range upgrade options to different unit types. There are spells you can cast to buff units with all kinds of abilities, resistances, and weapon enchantments. It's all about taking one unit and keeping it alive for as long as possible so it can level up and get ridiculously powerful, rather than just replacing a basic starting unit with a completely different and more advanced unit. It didn't seem uncommon in the games I played to have units with 10 or or more buffs and upgrades on them by the end.

The AI was giving me a bit of a hard time on Impossible for a while, when I ended up at war with 3 wizards simultaneously and I'd been through a very greedy period with very few units. A whole shitload of magic to hold them at bay while I cranked out the defenses, and the danger is over. By the time I've subjugated these three, I forsee no significant resistance from the last three.

The races feel a bit too similar. There's a few unique units (I love the Undead flying galleons), but about 90% are nearly identical to their counterparts from the other races. I still really like the gobloads of units, but I feel like they could have been varied a bit more.

Side-note: don't waste time building a temple to Krolm. His berserkers are awful compared to the awesome units from the other 4 temples I've tried. They feel like they should be a mid-tier ~400g unit, not a 700g elite. I was so in love with my Priestesses and Paladins from the last game; these guys dissappoint me greatly.

(Luckily the Ancient Liches I picked up a little while later help to compensate!)

I've been really enjoying the game, although I'm somewhat disappointed with the AI. Even on impossible, it's pretty basic and rather than the AI being better, it just gets a ton more units, most of which are generally warriors and archers with few upgrades. I haven't found any downsides to expanding, and more cities means more gold/mana/food to support bigger armies and more special resources for upgrades or special units.

City specialization seems to be key as well, with all of the multiplier buildings, and is also somewhat race-specific. Undead excel at mana-focused towns, Monsters excel at food-focused towns, and Humans excel at gold-focused towns. For units, all 3 seem fairly similar, though skeleton warriors/archers seem really strong early on with their extra missile defense. I generally find catapults better than the undead flying galeases though, since the 3 range lets them attack from safety. Trolls can be strong with their regeneration, but you generally need to buy lots of armor upgrades to help them survive castle sieges, at least against the higher AI's that will throw 5-6 attacks at them in a turn.

For spells, there's a lot of redundancy and spells that I generally don't find worth the mana to cast, but the staple ones I use are- single target and AoE nukes, unit buffs like regen and bonus life damage, the city buff to speed city growth, and summons for scouting or emergency defenders. It always seems like gold is by far the most important and limiting resource, though- I generaly can get by with one or two food-focused cities, and a couple mana-focused cities, but I can never get enough gold- especially since I really want to buy all the upgrades for my expensive units to make sure I get the most bang for my buck. If I'm going to spend 700 gold to build a unit, I might as well spend the rest required to make him an invincible killing machine, or else I would have been better off just spamming warriors/archers and swarming the enemy with them.

Yeah, gold is king for all three races, no question, and that makes humans the best race. The upper tier units are all expensive, and by end-game you can easily spend 1k+ on unit upgrades as soon as they spawn.

Another big advantage for humans is that their standard units can be upgraded into the temple units (warrior -> veteran -> paladin, healer -> cleric -> priestess, etc.), so you can easily pop a bunch of level 5+ temple units as soon as you have access.

Undead have a few amazing units (vampires and ancient liches spring to mind), but the lack of a healer support unit leaves them behind humans. There's also a lot of high-tier units that are immune to death magic, and that really cripples the best undead units. Being able to pump out mana from your cities is less useful than you might think; spells just don't seem that powerful. I rarely cast anything but unit buff spells; they do so much more damage than me.

Just getting into my first monster game; not super impressed so far. Food is really just half-value gold, and no super exciting units yet. I haven't got any temple units yet, so hopefully they'll kick ass.